The Black Album was (and of course, still is) considered as Prince's most funky album. So, why would Prince even delete the album in late 1987 right after his 1987 double disc opus, Sign O' The Times was released? Where can I get a CD copy of The Black Album?

call me stupid, but wasnt it cuz this is the one he was trippin on ?

No, it's cuz X and Ingrid Chavez messed with his mind...

I got my copy of the Black album (CD) at a used record store. I had not heard anything about it before I found it. I just bought it because it was PRINCE.

Please search this site for the answers.

I tried to find the right threads but could not...and they have only been in the past week or so. There is plenty of info about this. And several threads in the past few weeks. All of the answers are there.

Read the Lovesexy tour program, it'll tell you why. It's kinda cryptic, but it's his own personal explanation.

It was an awful album to begin with...

rainbowchild said:

Bite your tongue... the Black Album was a classic in it's own right.

rainbowchild said:

Hey, my jaw dropped when I first heard this back in '88.
This was, in retrospect, the first consciously non-commercial album of his career. He just served up some x-rated funk no station would touch, put a solid black cover on it and said "here ya go".
Even more importantly, perhaps the unheralded last of his string of ground-breaking mindblowers, an award usually reserved for Lovesexy, which in retrospect now seems overated.
Prince even did the gangsta rap before N.W.A.....
"Bob George", anyone? Prince as a pimp with a gun, slapping around and cursing his ho', and shooting at cops?!
"Oh, shit...the nigger's got a laser! Let's get the hell out of here!"
All done in that slowed down devil-voice.
I'm listening to this in '88, I'm 18 years old, and I'm like: WTF!?!?!?

And I don't buy the "it's dated" argument. So is a lot of rap and rock from years past. But that doesn't mean it wasn't original and new at the time.

All props to the Black Album!

ROLLING STONE (1990)

Despite his all-hours intensity, the man still has his manners. He wouldn't have called this late, Prince says apologetically, if he didn't have some interesting news. He'd already provided some news earlier in the week, detailing, among other things, a late-night crisis of conscience a few years back that led him not only to shelve the infamous Black Album but also to try and change the way he wrote his songs -- and led his life.

The crisis didn't involve a leap or a loss of faith, Prince has said, but simply the realization that it was time to stop acting like such and angry soul. "I was an expert at cutting off people in my life and disappearing without a glance back, never to return," he'd said. "Half the things people were writing about me were true.".....

.....Still, that probably wouldn't prevent the song from getting a parental-warning sticker. "I don't mind that," Prince says. "I think parents have a right to know what their children are listening to."

At first it seems an unlikely sentiment coming from the man who once wrote about the onanistic doings of a woman sitting with a magazine in a hotel lobby. But Prince hasn't turned into a bluenose, he insists -- he's just changed his outlook on how to present his still eros-heavy creations.

The change, he says, came soon after he finished the Black Album, in 1987. The reason the album was pulled from release had nothing to do with record-company pressure, he insists, or with the quality of the songs. Rather, Prince says, he aborted the project because of one particular dark night of the soul "when a lot of things happened all in a few hours." He won't get specific, saying only that he saw the word God. "And when I talk about God," he says, "I don't mean some dude in a cape and beard coming down to Earth. To me, he's in everything if you look at it that way.

"I was very angry a lot of the time back then," he continues, "and that was reflected in that album. I suddenly realized that we can die at any moment, and we'd be judged by the last thing we left behind. I didn't want that angry, bitter thing to be the last thing. I learned from that album, but I don't want to go back."

By the time of the album Lovesexy, Prince says, he was a certifiably nicer human being -- and a happier creator. "I feel good most of the time, and I like to express that by writing from joy," he says. "I still do write from anger sometimes, like 'Thieves in the Temple.' But I don't like to. It's not a place to live."
[This message was edited Wed May 12 17:01:01 2004 by Universaluv]

it's a great record

Universaluv said:

did he really say that????

we'd be judged by the last thing we left behind
[This message was edited Fri May 14 17:07:08 2004 by tritoncin]
[This message was edited Fri May 14 17:08:08 2004 by tritoncin]

tritoncin said:

Don't just luagh at something without stating an opinion, why is it so funny. it seems like a very true statment he made.

eugnj420 said:

That honor goes to Dirty Mind.



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[This message was edited Fri May 14 20:53:57 2004 by Supernova]

it was deleted because it was a half-assed collection of throwaway tracks. he invented a deep and mysterious reason for it being pulled, and thus it gained a notoriety that it never deserved.

musically it's about the same as Chaos & Disorder - - - a random grab-bag of tracks, none of which are really that compelling.

He made the right decision. True, I like the album to a certain extent, but by P's standards - especially during that time frame - it's very subpar.

Maybe he thought it was Too Graphic and wouldn't be Commercial and Lovesexy would be a better choice.

JonSnow said:

true.

What i read was that Prince was in a FUCK YOU mood when recording this one. Finally when he wanted to release it, he didn't want the people to hear his mood... As far as i'm considrered, he can record a record everytimre he is in such a mood!!! It is a great one!!

Lennon said:

I think you're right and I find that offensive...it's very selfish IMO...the inspiration for those songs came from somewhere, the inspiration of people around him, his luck to be in the situations he was in at the time (an odd time for music), 'god' if you believe in that sort of thing, etc. What kind of artist is he to try and limit who gets to hear it? He's always seemed to have some weird need for control that goes beyond just making sure he gets paid fairly. Prince went through the motions of creating this record, he should have lived with the consequences...it probably wouldn't have been as popular a record if he didn't try to kill it but it would have been more pure to allow it to play out without the extra bs. His, er, 'drama queen' style campaign to kill the album made it a stupid circus...when I finally bought a copy of the CD I was like, 'cool record, what was the big deal?'

my opinion, fwiw
[This message was edited Sat May 15 14:20:44 2004 by slebnak]

Bob George, c'mon the badest strangest tune he ever wrote,
when i first hear it, i thought what the fuck, this is some cool shit, nobody, and i mean nobody was doing stuff like that then, way ahead of its time.
Two Nigs United 4 west compton, how bad a tune is that! nothing hes done since then has come close!
Rock hard in a funky place! I never get sick of it, always hear something new in it.
sure Cindy C is dated but because of the groundbreaking three

Bob George
2 nigs united 4 west compton
Rock hard in a funky place

i have to say this is truly the LAST of his mind blowing albums
with all due respect to the lovesexy crowd.
this was the end.

And prince himself said, he was angry and wanted to change
and change he did, good for him.
but not good for all of us who got spoiled expected mindblowing music year after year.

Rainbow Children , Musicology, LOL retarded kiddie music compared the above
but as long as prince is happy, i guess thats all that matters

rainbowchild said:

WHAT????? Damn, and of course you love TRC? Now of course it’s possible to like both records it would not surpise me if lots of fans come down on of these two sides. And I appreciate that but if I was being selfish I would tell Prince to forget the watered down elevator funk of TRC and keep up the real funk, keep bringing it raw a la Dirty Mind and, yes, most definitely, the BLACK ALBUM.

The Black album was EXCELLENT..I LOVE it. Prince should have Released it.

To me the cancellation of the release was absurd on so many levels. For one, the actual music still leaked out via bootlegs, so the self censorship failed. Secondly Prince actually performed many of these "evil" songs on the Lovesexy tour, and released them on the Lovesexy Live video. Fairly hypocritical I would have thought. And artistically Lovesexy (stupid title!) would have made infinitely more sense if we could ALL have heard what he was reacting against. The Darkness and the Light... I know it's all been said before... Perhaps it did make sense if it was really an act of revenge against Warners for not allowing Sign to be a triple...

In retrospect..I must've seemed like some obsessed Nut..I was 17 and at the Wrecka Stow every day looking for that damn album..even the stores didn't know what the hell I was talkin about.....Eventually I crept up on one (when I was least expecting it) ..I had to go back and buy 2....I thought I had found some sort of buried treasure.....

Ahhhh to be young and full of nothing else to worry about but where my next Prince album was coming from...

he had the right to pull it whenever he wanted.
it's his work, his "baby".
if he didn't want it in the world, for whatever reason, he
had the right to make it available.

i have a copy, and i love it, but i don't feel that he owed it to
me or anyone to release it.

ColdCoffee said:[quote]he had the right to pull it whenever he wanted.
it's his work, his "baby".
if he didn't want it in the world, for whatever reason, he
had the right to make it available.

i mean UNavailable

JonSnow said:

agreed

It was shelved for many reasons, but the main reason boils down to this...

It was never supposed to be seen as part of "Prince's" catalogue of albums (it was a side
project, like the later NPG albums), and Prince didn't want it being viewed as such. He thought
that if he died or never made another album, he didn't want "The Black Album" to be his
final statement/release. People were taking the album too seriously, and it wasn't a serious
album... it was mostly a mixture of 'party music' and 'fuck you' songs.

BorisFishpaw said:

but I got a feeling the man was on some drugs that made him think he was gonna die.. he had some major paranoid actions/statements around this time.. he was fuckin with something..